Monthly Archives: August 2013

The other day, my boyfriend said something interesting to me. “You have such a tremendous vocabulary”, he lamented, right after I had declared that ‘ugh I can’t maths’, or something similarly erudite. “I wish you’d use it.” He had a point, so I have resolved to start reminding myself of good words in my arsenal that I don’t get out nearly often enough.

My very first word of the week – you see, I am determined to do things here after all, even if they really are only for myself – is lugubrious. According to Wikitionary:

LUGUBRIOUS: Gloomy, mournful or dismal, especially to an exaggerated degree.“The poor lighting and sparse maintenance, plus the rarefied traffic on its wide boulevards, made the effect of Pyongyang on the tourist distinctly lugubrious.” “His client’s lugubrious expression tipped off the detective that something lurked beneath her optimistic words.”

I have had, it must be said, something of a lugubrious few days. On Monday of last week, all was well with the world; I had a truly magnificent birthday, and was feeling optimistic about the future. On Wednesday I got back into the office of the new part-time job I’d been at for a week or two, and was told that the girl they’d got in to cover for me while I was at the zoo was so much faster than I was that they’d given the job to her instead.

For lots of reasons, I was entirely heartbroken. I don’t have an amazing history with office jobs – I’m good at writing and good at freelancing, but give me admin or data entry to do and apparently I turn into a blithering idiot – and I’d really hoped that this one would work out, not least because I could do with the extra money. And by “could do with”, I mean “couldn’t really do without”.

It’s been nearly a week now, and I think I’m finally starting to regain some equilibrium and crack on with all the various bits of my life I’ve neglected for days. It’s been an exercise in how very badly simply switching off for a short while can affect things: I’m staring now at a pile of laundry taller than I am, and a deadline that snuck past me when I was looking the other way, and a small heap of personal errands like getting things printed out and filling in forms and going to the post office to pick up a parcel.

I’m glad that, at the moment, a lugubrious six days lasts only six days, and not the six weeks that it might have at other points in my life. I’m hopeful that I’m right, and that from tomorrow morning I really will make sure that all those things are sorted out and not neglected for any longer. And I’m certain that at half past three in the morning I should really be trying to sleep, and not sitting in bed with my netbook writing blog posts about adjectives.

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